MOOCs, Open educational resources and social networking: bridging the gap between informal and formal learning

MOOCs and open educational resources (OER) provide a wealth of learning opportunities for people around the globe, many of whom have no access to formal higher education. OER are often difficult to locate and are accessed on their own without support from or dialogue with subject experts and peers. This paper looks at whether it is possible to develop effective learning communities around OER and whether these communities can emerge spontaneously and in a self-organised way without moderation. It examines the complex interplay between formal and informal learning, and examines whether MOOCs are the answer to providing effective interaction and dialogue for those wishing to study at university level for free on the Internet.

Una experiencia docente internacional para la elaboración de material docente práctico sobre la Farmacología

El ABP se basa en enfrentar al estudiante a una situación que se encontrará en el ejercicio de su profesión (Molina, 2003), resolviendo, farmacológicamente en este caso, un problema de salud de un paciente por parte de estudiantes de Ciencias de la Salud o las causas de un delito por parte de un criminólogo. En el curso 2013/14 en colaboración con profesores de Farmacología de las universidades de Montevideo (Uruguay) y la Nacional de Tucumán (Argentina) participamos en la XII Jornadas de Investigación en Docencia Universitaria, elaborando una colección de problemas basados en los medicamentos que alteraban la conducta del individuo y que fueron publicados en formato libro (ISBN: 978-99-7471-410-6) y en Internet (bajo licencia Creative Commons). Dada la valoración positiva por parte de los estudiantes de este tipo de aprendizaje, el objetivo de esta red era implicar a mas profesores y a alumnos de master y/o doctorado por un lado, y ampliar la colección de problemas iniciada en colaboración con ambas universidades iberoamericanas, pero abarcando temas más allá de la psicofarmacología, que sea de utilidad a estudiantes de Ciencias de la Salud, ya sean de grado o de postgrado, e incluso, a estudiantes de Ciencias sociales y Jurídicas.

A novel concept-level approach for ultra-concise opinion summarization

The Web 2.0 has resulted in a shift as to how users consume and interact with the information, and has introduced a wide range of new textual genres, such as reviews or microblogs, through which users communicate, exchange, and share opinions. The exploitation of all this user-generated content is of great value both for users and companies, in order to assist them in their decision-making processes. Given this context, the analysis and development of automatic methods that can help manage online information in a quicker manner are needed. Therefore, this article proposes and evaluates a novel concept-level approach for ultra-concise opinion abstractive summarization. Our approach is characterized by the integration of syntactic sentence simplification, sentence regeneration and internal concept representation into the summarization process, thus being able to generate abstractive summaries, which is one the most challenging issues for this task. In order to be able to analyze different settings for our approach, the use of the sentence regeneration module was made optional, leading to two different versions of the system (one with sentence regeneration and one without). For testing them, a corpus of 400 English texts, gathered from reviews and tweets belonging to two different domains, was used. Although both versions were shown to be reliable methods for generating this type of summaries, the results obtained indicate that the version without sentence regeneration yielded to better results, improving the results of a number of state-of-the-art systems by 9%, whereas the version with sentence regeneration proved to be more robust to noisy data.